only
two regions which masters have not organised are the intellectual and
moral regions. The first has been tacitly and inevitably extruded. A
good deal more work is required from the boys, and unless a boy's
ability happens to be of a definite academical order--in which case he
is well looked after--there is no loop-hole through which intellectual
interest can creep in. A boy's time is so much occupied by definite
work and definite games that there is neither leisure nor, indeed,
vigour left to follow his own pursuits. Life is lived so much more in
public that it becomes increasingly difficult for SETS to exist; small
associations of boys with literary tastes used to do a good deal in the
direction of fostering the germs of intellectual life; the net result
is, that there is now far less interest abroad in intellectual things,
and such interests as do exist, exist in a solitary way, and generally
mean an intellectual home in the background.

In the moral region, I think we have much to answer for; there is a
code of morals among boys which, if it is not actively corrupting, is
at least undeniably low. The standard of purity is low; a vicious boy
doesn't find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social
success. Then the code of honesty is low; a boy who is habitually
dishonest in the matter of work is not in the least reprobated. I do
not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded
and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of their
own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere
with the practice of others, or even to disapprove of it. And then
comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honour; the one
unforgivable offence is to communicate anything to masters; and an
innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before
perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have
erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of either sympathy or
pity from other boys; while if he breathed the least hint of his
miserable position to a master and the fact came out, he would be
universally scouted.

This is a horrible fact to contemplate; yet it cannot be cured by
enactment, only from within. It is strange that in this respect it is
entirely unlike the code of the world. No girl or woman would be
scouted for appealing to police protection in similar circumstances; no
man would be required to submit to violence or even